Because I am not trying to turn this into an advertisement for my company, I will not list who I work for. I also only speak for myself and not my company in any way. I will say that I have been employed at a well established internet/brick & mortar store for 8 years. During this time I have witnessed and learned the ins and outs of the gaming industry. While I certainly do not claim to know it all, as only a fool would, I do believe my expertise in the industry is of an extremely high level. Below you will find a few points I would like to make. This may be a bit long and if you are interested in thoughts on the C&D's skip down to #3.
1. First and foremost GW makes it very difficult for retailers to really support their products. Unless you sign up to become an "official" outlet and follow all of their draconian rules to the letter, it can be very difficult to get any kind of support from GW. For instance if someone bought a box of minis from us, got home and opened it to find out it was missing parts, there would be little that could be done about it except for us to take a loss and replace the product at our cost leaving us with a defective product. GW simply would not even rectify the matter because we are not an official source of their product. This is just one of many examples of policies by GW that makes dealing with them difficult.
2. During all the rants and anger over GW's latest round of C&D's issued to BGG and others, I have noticed a large portion of the users here feel they have been neglected and abused by GW and that they only cater to the 14 year old adolescents. While this may be true in an actual GW store, in 8 years I have sold 1 GW product to person under the age of adulthood. The large majority of our GW customers fall in the 20-40 year old range.
I can fully sympathize with the what many feel is a lack of respect shown by GW to it's customers. GW certainly does seem to rely on a rinse and repeat type of strategy concerning their products. As a retailer I look at the fact that we sold through 50 copies of the new Space Hulk in 7 days, many of these copies being full retail or above due to the fact that the game was out of print from the moment we got our shipment.
It is honestly beyond my comprehension how a company that has been very vocal about some financial difficulties and rising costs of manufacturing of their products, could simple allow a cash cow like Space Hulk to disappear within a matter of weeks. If this game was still in print, I have no doubt we would have purchased and sold 200 copies of this game already. Which is in all reality and absolutely insane amount of sales for anyone one product.
It seems like GW has serious case of, for lack of better term, "penis envy". The problem is they are envious of their own "organ". It seems like GW does not want anyone spending any money on anything unless they are buying Space Marines, Chaos Space Marines, Elves or Dwarves. I use those 4 as examples because I believe them to be the 4 armies that have been rehashed more than any of the others.
From personal talks with our customers that buy GW product, if GW would just put some effort into their other products, money would rain from the heavens. This is again, just my personal experience.
3. C&D's - This is absolutely nothing new for Games Workshop. They at one point years ago actually attempted to tell retailers, and still do if you become an "official store", at what price you can sell their products. Of course they only way they can do this is if they control all distribution of their product and refuse to sell to you if you do not follow their rules.
On a personal level we received a C&D from them months ago. We have attempted to engage them for clarification on their policies and they will not even return our correspondence. A lot of what they claim to be an infringement on their copyrights and IP's, in fact is simply not true. The only reason why they are successful at these type of bullying tactics is because no wants to or is financially able to stand up to them. As of this moment we have yet to completely comply with their wishes. Only time will tell if the owner concedes to their wishes or sticks to his guns.
4. Because the above sounds like I am doing nothing but bad mouthing GW, I would like to state that we do a very healthy amount of GW sales. I believe they make very good quality and very fun products. But I can not help think that they could be so much more successful if they would enter the 21st century of the business world.
5. Warcraft - on a bit of an off note I can't help but think a lot of this stems from the fact that GW, over the course of the last 25 years, has had to watch a fledgling software company, that flat out ripped off every idea they had from GW, turn into a multi-billion dollar entity.
I have a strange feeling the art director at Flying Frog has a casting couch in his office 
